Why and When to Invest in a CMDB System

The CMDB tidal wave may seemed to have peaked about two or three years ago and left a trail of ruin and devastation in its wake. However, like many technology trends, the CMDB built up a lot of hype, then confusion, then disillusion. Missed in all of this, however, is the fundamental fact that a well planned investment in a CMDB system can become the single most meaningful catalyst you can have in “modernizing” your IT organization; including assimilating cloud-related technologies and services.

Part of the confusion around CMDBs is the name, compounded as well by their ITIL roots, by marketing hype, and by the overarching tendency of many analysts to force everything into market buckets with walls as high as the Rockies.

So I’d like to start out with a few words about what it is you might be buying in 2011. I’m starting with ITIL — admittedly one of the culprits — but also the originator of many of the more visionary ideas surrounding CMDB systems along with the (terrible) name itself.

The following definitions are taken from ITIL v3’s Service Transition book:

Configuration Management Database (CMDB) — A database used to store Configuration Records throughout their Lifecycle. The Configuration Management System maintains one or more CMDBs; and each CMDB stores Attributes of Configuration Items (CIs) and Relationships with other CIs.

Configuration Management System (CMS) — A set of tools and databases that are used to manage an IT Service Provider’s Configuration data. The CMS also includes information about Incidents, Problems, Known Errors, Changes and Releases; and may contain data about Employees, Suppliers, locations, Business Units, Customers and Users. The CMS includes tools for collecting, storing, managing, updating, and presenting data about all Configuration Items and their Relationships. The CMS is maintained by Configuration Management and is used by all IT Service Management Processes.

(Not expressly stated here is that the CMS can contain one or multiple federated CMDBs, along with discovery tools, application dependency mapping tools, and many other resources from performance management to configuration management (in the narrower

Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS) — A set of tools and databases that are used to manage knowledge and information. The SKMS includes the Configuration Management System, as well as other tools and databases. The SKMS stores, manages, updates, and presents all information that an IT Service Provider needs to manage the full Lifecycle of IT Services.

All that’s well and good, but in my experience when I first spoke to initial CMDB system deployments in 2004 in the U.S. what everyone naturally really wanted was what ITIL v3 calls the SKMS. In other words, a way of deconstructing and reconstructing their existing investments so that data, analytics, discovery tools, and modeled configurations and topologies became far more reconciled and dynamic. And, that leads me to the real reason to invest in a CMDB/CMS initiative: The CMDB is revolutionary because it deconstructs traditional product assumptions and allows for the reconciliation and effective usage of many different sources of service management information to support virtually all IT processes.

EMA just did an assessment of eleven CMDB system vendors and looked at more than 20 deployments in the process. These served to drive a number of things home (which impacts the “when you buy” from the title in multiple ways). Bottom line: CMDB-related technologies worth their salt are just now emerging on the market. Anyone who thinks that either the market, or the technologies, or the idea itself is “mature” is simply misinformed.

EMA always stresses “big vision and baby steps” to our IT clients during a strategic initiative, but the phrase ironically also applies to virtually all of the vendor offerings in this space up until the present. Unfortunately, most of the marketing hype has so far left out the “baby steps” part.

Here are just some of the things to keep in mind:

CMDB-related technologies are becoming increasingly dynamic to support more real-time requirements, including service performance, cross-domain virtualization and the move to cloud.

Some but not all vendors have put a premium on making CMDB systems easier to deploy and administer. One deployment claimed an ROI in three days for a half million dollar investment! (More normal expectations for effective deployments might be six months to one year; although EMA is very cautious about tagging elaborate ROI schemes around CMDBs. Like you’d expect a few easy calculations to provide ROI for America’s highways system, or the transit system for a major city.)